Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

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Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (born January 19, 1737 in Le Havre , † January 21, 1814 in Éragny near Paris ) was a French writer .

Life and work

Saint-Pierre (that's his real surname, even if he is often referred to as Bernardin in literary stories and encyclopedias) grew up in modest circumstances in Le Havre, received a decent schooling and was “infected” by literature when he read Robinson Crusoe . His uncle, a captain, is said to have taken him to the West Indies around 1749 . He then studied road and bridge construction at the newly founded École nationale des ponts et chaussées . He then joined the French army as an engineer, which was just on Austria's side during the Seven Years' War(1756–63) led against Prussia and England. But in 1762 he had to say goodbye, denounced as a difficult person. After that he led an erratic existence, determined by nebulous projects and their failure, with travels and longer stays in Russia and Germany. In 1768 he traveled to the then French island of Mauritius (Île de France) in the Indian Ocean with a job as a planning engineer, but found no real area of ​​activity and dealt with nature studies .

In 1771, Saint-Pierre settled penniless in Paris and began to write. When he did not find the contact he had hoped for with the Encyclopédists , he made friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who lived in seclusion on the outskirts, and became his disciple. His first work: Voyage à l'Isle de France (= Journey to the Île de France, 1773) went unnoticed. The three-volume Études de la nature (= studies of nature, 1784), on the other hand, were a success , whose enthusiastic admiration and often extremely speculative explanation of "nature" apparently hit the zeitgeist.

La mort de Virginie . Colored copper engraving by Legrand based on a model by Michel Lambert, late 18th century (detail)

In the third new edition of the Études (1788), Saint-Pierre timidly appended the little novel Paul et Virginie as the fourth volume , which hit surprisingly well. From 1789 onwards, it was published one after the other, usually printed separately (many of them illustrated), was translated, dramatized and set to music and served as a template for many paintings and engravings . In mostly abridged and “cleaned up” editions, it quickly established itself as a classic children's book (which, for example, Gustave Flaubert cites as a natural reading of Emma Bovary's novel around 1850 ).

As a follow-up to Rousseau's Julie or Die neue Heloise , the novel deals with the difficulties that an esteemed society usually puts in the way of love affairs between unequal partners. It tells the story of two half-orphans who, together with their mothers, grow up carefree of class differences in the idyllic nature of the island of Mauritius, until a noble great-aunt Virginies brings them to France and thus separates the young people who are now loving - forever; Because Virginie, who does not want to get married appropriately, but wants to remain loyal to Paul, is sent back by her angry aunt, is shipwrecked on her return voyage, and Paul becomes through the disillusioning lectures that an old man friend gives him about the rigid class society in the France holds the Ancien Régime , so frustrated that after Virginie's death he loses courage and dies.

Thanks to the success of the Études and especially of Paul et Virginie ( 1806 ), Saint-Pierre finally achieved social recognition. In 1789 he was discussed as a tutor for the Dauphin . In 1792 he married the daughter of his publisher and was appointed last director of the Jardin du Roi . In 1794 he was appointed professor of morals at the newly founded Paris teacher training center (later the École normal supérieure ). In 1795 he became a member of the Institut de France, which had just been created by amalgamating several academies . Naturally, after Paul et Virginie , he wrote a number of shorter and longer works, including the stories La Chaumière indienne (= The Indian Hut ) and Le Café de Surate (both 1790), but they were largely ignored. Posthumously in 1815 the three-volume Harmonies de la nature came out, which also failed to build on the success of the Études .

From the late 18th to the early 20th century, thanks to Paul et Virginie, Saint-Pierre was known to every educated French from childhood. Today it is almost forgotten.

Settings

The French composer Erik Satie worked together with Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet on a (ultimately unfinished) opera setting by Paul et Virginie . In 1989 the German composer Moritz Eggert set the material to music as a puppet opera with the title Paul and Virginie for the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater .

literature

  • Malcolm Cook: Bernardin de Saint Pierre. A life of culture. Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Assoc. and Maney Publ., London 2006. ISBN 1-900755-81-5
  • Hinrich Hudde: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre "Paul et Virginie". Studies on the novel and its impact . Fink, Munich 1975.
  • Anastase Ngendahimana: Les idées politiques et sociales de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Lang, Bern a. a. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-26-2
  • Gert Pinkernell : Interpretations. Collected studies on the Romanesque Middle Ages and on French literature of the 18th and 20th centuries . Winter, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-8253-0608-9 (contains a study on Paul et Virginie )
  • Jörn Steigerwald: L'Arcadie historique. Paul et Virginie de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre entre classicisme et préromantisme , in: Revue germanique internationale 16 (2001). Entre classicisme et romantisme around 1800 , pp. 69–86.

Web links

Commons : Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Yves Lecouturier: Célèbres de Normandie . Orep Editions, 2007, ISBN 978-2-915762-13-6 , pp. 12 . (French)
personal data
SURNAME Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1737
PLACE OF BIRTH Le Havre
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1814
Place of death Éragny